Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Edith Sitwell

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation they do not want to attract attention.

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.

Still falls the rain - dark as the world of man, black as our loss - blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... but I am too busy thinking about myself.

In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.

It is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.

Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

But I saw the little-Ant men as they ran Carrying the world's weight of the world's filth And the filth in the heart of Man-- Compressed till those lusts and greeds had a greater heat than that of the Sun.

I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.

I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

What the reporters are like! They are mad with excitement at the thought of my approaching demise. Kind Sister Farquhar, my nurse, spends much of her time in throwing them downstairs. But one got in the other day, and asked me if I mind the fact that I must die.

One's own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.

Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?

I'm not the man to baulk at a low smell, I'm not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.

The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" - a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.

If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?

The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.

There is no truth. Only points of view.

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don't! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

By 'happiness' I do not mean worldly success or outside approval, though it would be priggish to deny that both these things are most agreeable. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature.

I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. It is no season in which to wander the world as if one were the wind blowing aimlessly along the streets without a place to rest, without food, and without time meaning anything to one, just as time means nothing to the wind.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

I have never, in all my life, been so odious as to regard myself as 'superior' to any living being, human or animal. I just walked alone - as I have always walked alone.

Tall windows show Infinity; And, hard reality, The candles weep and pry and dance Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within; When once I ventured in, Chill Silence, like a surging sea, Slowly enveloped me.

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.

What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.

Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.

When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.

Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.

Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity.

The poet is the complete lover of mankind.

I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.

Said the Sun to the Moon-'When you are but a lonely white crone, And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood, Remember only this of our hopeless love That never till Time is done Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one

... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.

Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.

Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.

[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.